The Book of Life - Upton Sinclair

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decays; but how would it be if the brain were a function of the consciousness—which is, so far as I can see, quite as likely a guess.

      I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility of this idea. I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits of those recently dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. Of course, you can go to any seance in the "white light" district of your city and receive communications from the souls of Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary, you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles; but you will not find much reality about any of these people, they will not tell you very much about the everyday details of their lives. This fact that so much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our own time tends to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever. How simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles would come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to find copies of his lost tragedies! You would think that the soul of Sophocles, seeing our great need of beauty and wisdom, would be interested to give us his works! From genius, operating under the guidance of the conscious mind, we get sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums give us suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the operation of the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, for example, from dissociated personalities.

      There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, produced by the automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who tells us in evident good faith that her conscious personality is entirely innocent of Patience, and all her thought and doings. Patience writes long novels and dramas in a quaint kind of old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing about this language. But does she positively know that when she was a child, she never happened to be in the room with someone who was reading old English aloud? Nothing seems more likely than that her subconscious mind heard some quaint, strange language, and took possession of it, and built up a personality around it, and even made a new language and a new literature from that starting point.

      That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subconscious revels. It creates new characters, with an imagination infinite and inexhaustible. Who has not waked up and been astounded at the variety and reality of a dream? Who has not told his dreams and laughed over them? The subconscious will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate rôles; it will put on costumes, and delight in being Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will even play at being "spirits"! It will be mischievous and impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of its own importance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. It will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief-stricken family; it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," and cause an earnest professor of "practical morality" to give up a respectable position in Columbia University and write books to convince the world that the dead are sending him messages.

      Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss Beauchamp. Remember that here we are not dealing with any guess work about "spirits"; here we have half a dozen different "controls," none of them the least bit dead, but all of them a part of the consciousness of one entirely alive young lady. A specialist has spent some six years investigating the case, day after day, week after week, writing down the minute details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant known as "Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom you ever held in your arms. Sally has love and hate, fear and hope, pain and delight—and Sally is a little demon, created entirely out of the subconsciousness of a highly refined and conscientious young college graduate of Boston. Sally spends Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; Sally uses Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about Miss Beauchamp; Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or makes her hear exactly the opposite of what is spoken to her. Yes, and Sally pleads and fights frantically for her life; Sally enters into intrigues with other parts of Miss Beauchamp, and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who is her Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge!

      And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a grieving mother, and made that mother think she was talking to the ghost of a long lost child? Can anybody doubt that Sally could and would play the part of any person she had ever known, or of any historic character she had ever read about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the conscious Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this, and was horrified when she was told about it. So here you have the following situation, no matter of guesswork, but definitely established: your dearest friend may act as a medium, and in all good faith may bring to the surface some part of his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in a hundred different rôles, and plays upon you with deliberate malice the most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks.

      And how much worse the situation becomes when to this there is added the possibility of conscious fraud! When the medium is a person who is taking your money, and thrives by making you believe in the "spirits" she produces! You may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of the Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, and in row after row of tents you may hear, and even see, every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs. And you may see poor farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their cheeks, listening to the endearments of their dead children, and to wisdom from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a Bowery accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years ago by Will Irwin in a book called "The Medium Game"; and then—after traveling from one kind of medium to another, and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he went into a "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most intimate secrets of his life!

      It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is at work upon a device to enable spirits to communicate with the living, if there really are spirits seeking to do this. It is Edison's idea that spirits may inhabit some kind of infinitely rarefied astral body, and he proposes to manufacture an instrument which is sensitive to an impression many millions of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a fairer test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is perfected and put to work by scientific men, I wish to suggest a few tests which will convince me that there really are spirits, and that the results are not to be explained by telepathy.

      First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are some useful things which were known to the people of ancient time, and are not known to anyone living now. For example, let one of the Egyptian craftsmen come forward and tell us the secret of their glass-staining, which I understand is now a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already suggested, will tell us where we can find his lost dramas; or if he doesn't know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give us this priceless information. All over the ancient lands are buried and forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus scrolls and graven tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowledge are thus concealed from us; and how simple for the ancient ones who possess this information to make it known to us, and so to convince us of their reality!

      Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but that they slowly fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose that a Raymond Lodge or other recently dead soldier wishes to communicate with his father and to convince his father that it is really an independent being, and not simply a part of the father's subconscious mind—let him try something like this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in six envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in a hat and draw out one of them. Now, assuming that the experimenter is honest, there is no living human being who knows the contents of that envelope, and if the medium is dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter, the chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. Assuming that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and read a folded letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, provided he is honest, and provided there are no mirrors or other tricks, holding the envelope behind his back, and tearing it open, and spreading it out for the convenience of the spirit. And now, if the spirit can read that letter correctly every time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever force we are dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the experimenter.

      Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel

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